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Over the past year, we've focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “above the fold” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads. We also developed innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

Today, in response to feedback from many of you who run branding campaigns, we're announcing a new filter that allows you to show your ads only on AdSense sites among the 1000 largest on the web as defined by DoubleClick Ad Planner. This new feature will ensure that your ads reach a large number of users, but only on well-known sites best suited for branding goals.

To activiate the new filter, select ‘non Ad Planner 1000’ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account. Keep in mind that not all sites in the Ad Planner 1000 are in the Google Content Network and that your ads will only show on those sites that are.

It's important to note that the Ad Planner 1000 does not take performance statistics into account, and that by enabling this filter, you may be excluding many sites that are relevant to your advertised products. Additionally, with this or any of our other brand filters enabled, your campaign will run on fewer sites, so you may need to raise your bids if you’d like to maintain your impression levels. We recommend experimenting to determine which feature or combination of features best meets your goals.

We hope this new feature gives you greater control and assurance over where your ads appear and makes the Google Content Network an even more powerful environment for effective branding campaigns.


Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager
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Today, we are introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns while offering advertisers access to better data for more informed media planning decisions.


Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites
The Ad Planner 1,000 list is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. Published monthly, this list details the number of unique visitors, page views and reach for each site for the top 1,000 sites globally. It’s a great way to quickly reference the most popular sites on the web.

This latest resource represents yet another step in the evolution of Ad Planner in providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites. In conjunction with our Ad Planner 1,000 list, the Google Content just released an Ad Planner 1,000 targeting feature. These two features combined provide an example of how Google is working to provide more actionable data for online display advertisers.


Exporting Google Content Network Placements to AdWords
Many Ad Planner users are also AdWords users, and one of the top requested features is to provide a simple and easy way to buy Google Content Network placements advertisers find through Ad Planner. The newly launched Export to AdWords feature enables advertisers to simply export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within AdWords.

For advertisers running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network, this provides an easy way to build media plans of managed placements. Now translating the great audience research data in Ad Planner into your AdWords campaigns is easier than ever.


Creating Lists in Ad Planner
To help you create your own list of favorite sites to save and add your media plans, we also recently launched “Lists” in Ad Planner. With “Lists”, you can store sites and placements in lists for future use in media plans. To get you started, we’ve made the Ad Planner 1,000 list available to all Ad Planner user accounts for use as a handy reference or for download.

Our goal with the Top 1000 Sites and other recent updates is to deliver new tools for greater planning efficiency and data to make more informed advertising decisions.

Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new features.

Posted by Rohit Kundaji, Software Engineer and Wayne Lin, Product Manager
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For part 3 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Ryan Van Horn, Account Coordinator at the digital agency Razorfish, who shared with us how his team used Ad Sitelinks to improve the user experience on branded search queries for the travel services and insurance company AAA. Here's what Ryan had to say:

What was the primary campaign/product you were marketing for the client?
AAA’s main focus is to drive consumers to sign up for AAA Membership service. In addition, AAA has several other metrics that are considered when determining the success of the program, such as travel bookings and user interaction with their maps services.

What was the client's goal?
Essentially, AAA wanted to improve the user experience on branded search terms. Consumers identify with the AAA brand in different ways. For some consumers, AAA is synonymous with roadside assistance, while others may associate AAA with insurance or discounts when traveling. The client wanted to find a solution that allowed the messaging on branded terms to convey the different services offered and to understand which message converted better, ultimately informing future testing opportunities.

What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?
Ad Sitelinks have allowed the team to tailor ad copy that encompassed the various AAA services by leveraging four additional links below the main ad copy. The links allow us to send consumers deeper into the AAA website and direct them to the most relevant landing page.

Can you describe the implementation process?
We chose the four services deemed most valuable by the client - Membership (join), Travel (bookings), Discounts, and AAA Map Services (Triptik Travel Planner) - and created a link for each service. We then selected the most relevant landing page for each link and created tracking that allowed us to monitor the performance of each individual link.


How did the Google solution perform?
The implementation of the Ad Sitelinks helped to improve both clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as consumers were able to click on the link that was most relevant to the service they were interested in and sent them to the most relevant landing page.

What improvements did the client see as a result of this campaign?
The program saw significant improvements in performance across the board.
  • CTR increased by 40%.
  • The average CPC decreased by 11%.
  • Overall conversion rate increased by 11%.
  • The cost-per-conversion was 14% more efficient after implementation.
Did any results surprise you?
While we were not surprised that overall performance improved, we were surprised by how much the performance improved. Initially, the Ad Sitelinks were launched within a campaign that only included the core branded AAA keywords. This particular campaign is a key membership volume driver and already had extremely high CTRs and conversion rates. To see CTRs increase by 6% and conversion rates increase by 11% was a much higher increase than we anticipated.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
Had Ad Sitelinks not been made available, we wouldn’t have had the ability to improve the overall user experience. Ad Sitelinks have allowed us to give the users options of other services offered by AAA. The program would have likely remained steady and would have not seen the improvements in performance. Overall, we feel that this ad placement enhanced searchers' interaction with the AAA brand while simultaneously improving performance of the core metrics.

For more information on Ad Sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, has one of the most recognizable logos in the sporting goods industry. A silhouette of Michael Jordan mid-jump graces the footwear, apparel, and equipment that make Jordan one of the most coveted basketball brands in the US.

Building energy
Although his likeness still appears on merchandise, Michael Jordan retired from his legendary role in the game in 1999, posing a challenge for Jordan Brand-- keeping Michael Jordan top of mind for younger consumers.

Looking for new ways to excite and engage youth within basketball culture, Jordan Brand turned to its agency partner, Wieden+Kennedy, New York (W+K, NY). Together, they hatched an idea for a campaign that veered from the TV campaigns they traditionally ran. As expected, they built an inventive, unique campaign around a basketball player. But the player was neither Michael Jordan nor another NBA star. It was Leroy Smith.

The man, the campaign
“Sophomore year of high school, Leroy Smith took Michael’s spot on the junior varsity team,” explains Jason Clement, Director of Findability and Search for W+K NY, of the true story that inspired the campaign. “Michael points to that as the moment when he realized he needed to work and train harder to become really good.”

With the campaign’s central character chosen (and the real Leroy Smith on board), the Jordan and Wieden+Kennedy teams crafted a narrative that would pull in their audience. Played by actor Charlie Murphy, the campaign’s Leroy sells motivational DVDs, promising to teach viewers the same skills he used to dominate Michael Jordan. The DVDs, along with posters, an iPhone app, and music videos can be found on his site, www.getyourbasketballon.com. And of course the campaign’s Leroy also has a YouTube Channel, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter feed to communicate with his fans. But to create buzz and hype, Wieden and Kennedy and Jordan chose not to brand the campaign.


The ultimate forum
And it was the discovery of this content that was key to the campaign’s success. The campaign’s six-week run opened with “Leroy” himself pitching his motivational DVDs in infomercial-style television ads during the NBA playoffs. Google AdWords search ads sent interested users to Leroy’s site. To reach additional basketball fans where they were actively spending their time, the Jordan and W+K NY teams used the Google Content Network to place a wide array of display and text ads on blogs and fan sites. By using keyword targeting to automatically place their ads on relevant sites on the Google Content Network, the team was able to find the right locations for their creative more efficiently.

The strategy proved effective. They found a lot of niche basketball blogs where he could reach their target with very, very little waste and get them excited about the campaign.

Once their ads were running, the reporting and optimization controls within the Content Network enabled the W+K NY team to see which sites were working best and adjust their targeting appropriately. As excitement over the Leroy Smith campaign grew, it was clear that it was striking a chord with its audience. A number of blogs had double-digit click through rates. People were taking screenshots of the ad on their blogs and then writing posts about how much they liked having the ad on their site.

When all that enthusiasm was translated into numbers, the Leroy Smith campaign had generated 188 million impressions and 296,000 clicks over the six weeks it ran. And users were highly engaged with the content, showing very low abandonment rates once on site. Video proved compelling as well, with 27,000 YouTube channel views and 229,000 views for Leroy Smith’s “Get Your Basketball On” infomercial video.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Our "Coffee break" series has provided us the chance to have great conversations with clients across industries, who have successfully used Google solutions to meet their marketing goals.

This time we sat down with Patrick Wang, Manager Online Marketing & Technologies from the search engine marketing company LeadQual, which implemented View-through conversion tracking to successfully demonstrate the positive impact of display advertising to Chegg, an ROI-driven textbook rental company founded in 2007 to help college students reduce their book purchase costs.

Here's what Patrick shared:

What was the client's goal?
Chegg was looking to expand its customer base for both rental and buy-back orders. It had more than doubled its growth year / year and had already heavily invested in search, yet had not been satisfied with the success of past display campaigns. We therefore needed a solution that provided reach while also being measurable and cost-effective.

What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?
We ran display campaigns on the Google Content Network, and used view-through-conversion tracking to demonstrate the additive value of display to growing Chegg's user base.

Can you describe the implementation process?
Chegg provided the display creative, with variations by season. We then developed contextually-targeted campaigns around themes such as "textbook," "used textbook" as well as target student groups like "fraternity." From there, we used the placement performance report to see which sites performed well, and moved them into management placements campaigns.

To receive view-through conversion statistics, we made sure that conversion tracking was set up.The campaigns began running in fall 2009 and remain active.

How did the Google solution perform?
By using view-through conversion tracking, we were able to show the client that the sales driven from the display campaign were within its cost/order metrics. We found that a quarter of the conversions came from people who had viewed, but not clicked, on one of Chegg's banner ads. If we simply looked at conversions directly from clicks, the cost-per-conversion would have been well above Chegg's goals.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
Without view-through conversion data, we would have had a difficult time convincing the client to invest in display.

For more information on view-through conversion tracking, please visit the Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Display advertising is changing rapidly with the emergence of audience data, engaging new ad formats, dynamic creatives, and new technologies. We'd like to invite you to a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategy.

Specifically, we’ll discuss:
  • Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising
  • How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to optimizing your campaigns
  • How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy
Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST
Register here

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Do you find yourself creating templated ads for clients where only a few variables change, such as a city, price or product? With the Ads Multiplier, templated ads can now be produced much faster.

The Ads Multiplier is a open source Google Apps Script for Google Spreadsheets that populates AdWords creative templates with a list of user-provided inputs. With the Ads Multiplier, just input variables, create the templated ad text and run the script to generate a new tab with your final ad creatives. The script is triggered via menu option: Ads Multiplier --> Generate Output.

See the screenshots below for an example of what the Ads Multiplier script can produce for Awesome Airlines, a hypothetical travel client:

Inputs:






Templates:



Completed Ads:







The best way to access and use the Ads Multiplier is through the sample spreadsheet provided here, which includes the example data for Awesome Airlines. Just click on "Use this template" to download a copy of the template into your Google Docs and run the script. You can edit and add new inputs and reuse the template. We do recommend occasionally coming back and getting the latest template from the link here to ensure you have the latest updates to the tool.

For more information on using the Ads Multiplier, please visit the Ads Multiplier wiki.

Posted by Adam Hersly, Launch Manager, Partner Solutions Organization Global Tools Team
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